Assistant Professor Lawrence Cappello‘s recent book, None of Your Damn Business: Privacy in the United States from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age, was the subject of an extensive review in last month’s issue of The Economist.

“ONE OF the toughest questions of modern life is where to draw the bounds of privacy—and privacy law. Digital technologies make a virtue of sharing. At the same time, the ability of governments and companies to keep people’s activities under surveillance has never been greater. Slick artificial-intelligence algorithms depend on data, and creeping authoritarianism around the world means that the collection of vast quantities of data may be a recipe for disaster.

“A historical perspective on privacy in America is provided by None of Your Damn Business: Privacy in the United States from the Gilded Age to the Digital Age (University of Chicago Press, 2019) by Lawrence Cappello, a professor of constitutional history at the University of Alabama. He notes that America was founded partly in rebellion against the privacy-violating British, so the debate over surveillance is as old as the country itself. The laws have always lagged behind the technology.”

Continue reading this story at The Economist‘s website.